Shindig - Glyn Wright

Glyn Wright seemed to appear from nowhere to walk away with prizes and accolades for his ?rst book: shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, his debut collection Could Have Been Funny was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and went on to win the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize. But appearances can be deceptive. A brilliant performer of his witty and dramatic poems, Glyn Wright has been a key player in the recent revival of Liverpool's now ?ourishing poetry scene. His verbal pyrotechnics ?re the page as well as the stage. As Ian McMillan wrote, his work has 'linguistic depth as well as oral felicity, and he's created a kind of plain language that sings'.Like his ?rst book, this second collection also blends the spiky and the lyrical. Accessible, entertaining, and, at times, unsettling, it is a book of rhythms and songs, sound worlds and silences, lives and voices. Jazzers and dancers, kids and codgers, blacksmith and bluesman, the ageing Beatlemaniac, the Beethoven fanatic and the bathroom opera star: all put it an appearance at the musical feast.

A brand new voice. And voice it is which is the principal concern of this fresh, accessible, humane, witty, incident-packed, character-crammed, absolutely un-self-centred poetry. Here's an elegiac and lyrical evocation of a port in decline and its declining unsung inhabitants. Glyn Wright sings them. In dramatic monologues from ordinary working - or out-of-work - people, their speech rendered with a ?ne and an inventive precision.
Poetry Book Society Bulletin - Liz Lochhead

These poems take you softly through the universes their words create, full of affection and fear, humour and menace. Wright makes a powerful contemporary music and this is one of the most accomplished ?rst collections I've read in years.
Ian Duhig

Excellent.like Alan Bleasdale's characters, Wright's bricklayers, bakers and joyriders stay with you.naming experiences often left out of poetry, remembering things all too easily forgotten.
Scratch - Mark Robinson